There’s a conversation I’ll never forget. It happened seven or eight years ago, and it changed the way I coach.
A woman had been gifted a session by one of my clients. She wasn’t my client herself, just someone filling in on a call that had been passed along to her. She told me the biggest thing standing between her and what she wanted was that she couldn’t follow her schedule. I knew right away that wasn’t the real problem. It was a symptom, not the cause.
So I asked her what she meant. She told me she couldn’t tell people no. She was a realtor, so if someone wanted to see a home at seven o’clock on a Wednesday night, or eight in the morning on a Saturday, her answer was always yes.
I told her it sounded less like a scheduling problem and more like the disease to please. She went quiet for a second, then said she’d never heard it put that way before, but that’s exactly what it was.
I didn’t ask her why. I asked her something different. What was the first time she remembered doing that?
After a long pause, she told me she grew up with an alcoholic father who was physically and emotionally abusive to her and her mother. Every day he came home from work, she would be waiting at the door, and whatever he asked of her, she did.
“So what’s really preventing you from getting what you want isn’t the disease to please,” I said. “It’s the program you installed to protect yourself and your mom from your dad.”
“Yes. I’ve never thought of it like that.”
She hadn’t just learned to please people. She had downloaded a survival strategy as a child, and that strategy quietly ran in the background of her mind, guiding her decisions, and she didn’t even know it.
What she experienced is now what I call seeing the strings. It’s the moment someone makes the unconscious conscious.
This image illustrates exactly what I mean.
Most of us think we’re driving. Most of us aren’t.
We picked up our strings early. A father who needed quiet. A house where love had conditions. None of that was your fault, but make no mistake, it is your responsibility.
There’s a difference between an excuse and an explanation.
An excuse says I can’t help it. An explanation says now I know where it started, and I can do something about it.
Most people stop at the excuse. They live pulled by strings they’ve never looked up to see, and they call it personality. It isn’t. It’s what they learned, a long time ago, before they had any say.
Seeing it doesn’t fix it, but it gives you a choice you didn’t have before.
Ask where the string started. That’s the question I asked that woman on the phone. Not why do you do this. When did you first learn to.
What you can see, you can study. What you can study, you can change.
That’s the whole of what I do, in one photograph and one phrase.
You don’t have to stay a puppet. You just have to look up.
My favorite quote is everyone you meet is fighting a battle you know nothing about. Be kind always.
My hope in writing this is that you may now understand you have been fighting a battle with yourself you knew nothing about.
And maybe you’ll learn to be a little kinder to yourself.
live freed,
Jordan
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